As society is becoming increasingly dependent on electronic devices, the information accessible through these devices is becoming increasingly lucrative to attackers. Many people have multiple devices, such as smart phones, tablet computers, notebook computers, desktop computers, and network attached storage systems. Information on financial accounts, medical records, emails, business documents may be stored on or accessible through one or more of a user's devices. Whereas the goal of many attacks in the past has been simply to render a device inoperable, the importance of the information accessible on users' devices and the number of devices having access to that information has led to more sophisticated attacks that range from encrypting data on a device and holding the device hostage to extracting valuable data from a user's device to the attacker's equipment.
Firewalls, access controls, intrusion detection encryption are but some of the measures employed to protect against unauthorized access to a network device. Even with protection that is generally recognized as adequate, skilled attackers may break through protection mechanisms or exploit vulnerabilities and gain access to a network device. As the level of connectedness increases with proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), protecting against unauthorized access to a network device will continue to increase in importance.